UC Santa Barbara

Moral judgment, a fundamental aspect of human behavior, involves evaluativedistinctions between actions deemed morally "good" or "bad." This dissertation delves into the cognitive and neurological processes underpinning moral judgment by examining two influential theoretical frameworks: Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC). MFT posits innate moral foundations (e.g., harm, fairness, loyalty) as the basis of morality, while MAC focuses on moral elements (e.g., helping kin, fairness) emerging from cooperation challenges. Despite the pervasive influence of morality research on communication and media content, particularly in areas like moralizing language on social media and persuasion strategies using moral framing, a comprehensive comparison of the neurological underpinnings across these theories has been lacking in the literature. The dissertation reveals neural networks related to the theory of mind to be associated with moral cognition across the two theories. However, it also reveals that the neural representation for each moral foundation and element exhibits distinct patterns. The factorization of neural representations of MFT and MAC provides robust evidence for the theoretical foundations of both frameworks, emphasizing the theoretical overlap of moral domains across the two theories. Moreover, different survey measures for moral sensitivity yield variations in predicting the neural representation of moral cognition, illustrating how a neuroscientific approach can offer additional validations of survey measures.This dissertation offers a nuanced understanding of moral cognition, revealing the complexity of neural representations associated with different moral foundations and elements from two competing theories of moral cognition.